All posts tagged Mark Pincus

Zynga’s third-quarter earnings are expected to show the once highflying videogame maker continues to struggle with a consumer shift to mobile devices.

Wall Street expects Zynga to report an adjusted loss of 4 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters, down from break-even in the year-ago period. Bookings are expected to fall 44% to $142.67 million from a year prior. Zynga’s conference call is scheduled for 5 p.m. E.T. Here are key points to seek out. Read More »

Mark Pincus, a pioneer of socially viral games like “FarmVille,” is bored with games.

Zynga’s founder and chairman made the admission during a days-long visit to Israel, where he had been touring and meeting with people in the local startup community.

Tuesday evening, Pincus gave an informal rooftop talk to dozens of young Israeli tech entrepreneurs hosted by the Garage Geeks, a non-profit professional group. During the Q&A portion, he was asked by Yossi Vardi, a longtime elder statesman of the Israeli venture funding community, what his favorite game was.

“Right now, I’m pretty bored with all games,’’ he said.

Come again? Nothing from a competitor like “Candy Crush” or “Angry Birds” even? Surely something from the recent Zynga stable of games, like “Running With Friends” or the new “Castleville” mobile app on Facebook.? Read More »

Don Mattrick’s move to become CEO of Zynga caught many by surprise, given founder Mark Pincus’ strong grasp on the company, his 61% share of voting rights and his reputation as a very hands-on manager.

Now the question is: What does the title of CEO mean at Mattrick’s Zynga?

According to people close to the executives, Mattrick will handle the bulk of Zynga’s day-to-day decisions. Meanwhile, Pincus will serve as chief product officer and will jointly run a new executive committee with Mattrick to oversee some of the larger strategy decisions.

The setup, which somewhat resembles the arrangement that Google had with Eric Schmidt when he was CEO, doesn’t clarify how the executives will hash out disagreements or even clearly split responsibilities – given how the decisions related to product will inevitably bleed into decisions related to the day-to-day operations of the game company.

Could the company be left with two top leaders, both separately answering to a board — that Pincus chairs?

Zynga declined to make Mattrick or Pincus available for interviews.

Bing Gordon, a Zynga board member who has been one of the closest advisers to Pincus, said the partnership works because of a deep level of mutual respect between the two executives, years in the making. Read More »

Don Mattrick, head of the company’s Xbox videogames division, speaks about Xbox One during a press event in May.

Don Mattrick better hope he can get Zynga’s stock up.

Mr. Mattrick, who is leaving Microsoft to be the CEO of the struggling game company, will be paid about 95% of his compensation in stock, people with knowledge of the matter said. Details of his compensation will be released in the coming days in a regulatory filing, these people added.

However, regardless of how much cash he actually gets, it’s likely to be far higher than his predecessor. In April, founder Mark Pincus dropped his annual salary to $1 (though he has already made hundreds of millions through stock sales). Read More »

It’s almost a rite of passage in the technology industry: A company founder–sometimes still baby-faced, sometimes facing later-stage pressures–winds up giving up the CEO job to someone else.

Bill Gates yielded the CEO post at Microsoft to Steve Ballmer, his longtime friend and lieutenant. Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, gave way to seasoned executive Meg Whitman. And amid struggles at Zynga, Mark Pincus said Monday he is stepping aside as CEO for Don Mattrick, the executive who had run Microsoft’s Xbox videogames division. Read More »

It was a game that was so successful it essentially spurred Zynga, at the time one of the hottest consumer Web IPOs of the year, to buy the company behind the game for more than $180 million.

“Draw Something” is a modern version of “Pictionary,” where users guess a word based on a drawing sent to their smartphone or tablet.

But soon after Zynga acquired “Draw Something,” the game faded in popularity as most do. The games industry is a hits-driven business, and requires developers to constantly be testing and releasing new titles to sate the short attention span of gamers, especially when it comes to smartphone games.

Things weren’t looking good for Zynga’s fated acquisition of “Draw Something.” That was until late last month, when Zynga released a sequel for the game, which became widely available as the company discussed its downbeat quarter and upcoming transition year.

Now, “Draw Something 2″ has been topping the Apple App Store for the better part of the week, and is among the top-100 grossing apps on the App Store, according to AppData. Read More »

Zynga was, at one point, one of the highest-profile consumer Web IPOs and the very clear leader of social gaming — and one of Facebook’s most prominent partners.

Since then, the stock has absolutely cratered and Zynga has struggled to find its identity. Is it a Web gaming company? Does it make mobile games? Will it be a gambling powerhouse? Or is it all of the above?

But perhaps more confusingly is that even amid the stalling of Zynga’s online gaming empire, Facebook’s games community still continues to grow, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Facebook’s most recent earnings call. Games represented 12 percentage points of Facebook’s 15% year-on-year growth in payments revenue.

It does seem that inside all of the data is a pretty solid vote of no confidence in Zynga’s capacity to become a truly cross-platform game-maker.

First: It’s worth remembering that the growth in games revenue that’s cited above is actually fed by desktop. The perception that desktop games are dying is actually not entirely accurate. Zynga’s success with FarmVille 2, a Web game, is a good indicator that it’s alive and well.

Facebook actually says Q1 was its largest three-month quarter of games revenue to date — despite a 37% drop in year-over-year payments from its largest developer. (You can probably read between the lines a little bit on that “largest developer” part.)

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus speaks at an event at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco in October 2011.

Zynga just posted its first-quarter earnings, in which it reported a steep decline in the number of players going to its games on a daily basis.

The company actually reported a surprise profit, though bookings fell nearly as much. Zynga had a profit of $4.1 million, or less than a penny a share, compared with a year-earlier loss of $85.4 million, or 12 cents a share.

Some quick context: There weren’t any mobile game launches between “Bubble Safari” and “What’s The Phrase,” which came out earlier this month, but there are more are on the way. That can lead to a major drain on Zynga’s DAUs, who have proven to be very fickle gamers.

Still, this is a very steep decline, even amid a drought of launches.

And there are scant details about how well Zynga’s mobile business is doing. Despite Zynga’s need to find ways to expand and grow into a mobile gaming company, the only real indication that Zynga is having any success is that it had a game in the top of the app store earlier this month, What’s The Phrase (which has also fallen off a cliff). Read More »